Billionaire Bill Koch Fights Fake Wine With High-Tech Team

The University of Bordeaux campus resembles a weekend estate in the Gironde: sprawling gardens suffused with the smell of geraniums, scattered chateaux co-opted as classrooms or labs. Tucked away in a leafy grove is an incongruously modern research facility known as the Centre d’Etudes Nucleaires de Bordeaux Gradignan, or CENBG, home to the sleek, wood-sided lab of physicist Philippe Hubert.

Hubert specializes in radioactivity, and the lab contains three detectors, the most impressive of which resembles a huge barrel wrapped in lead salvaged from a Roman shipwreck off the British coast. The lead doesn’t affect the detector’s readings, Hubert explains, since the metal’s naturally occurring isotopes have dissipated over the intervening centuries. The machine is traditionally used to evaluate wastewater from hospitals or fallout from nuclear disasters, but today it contains a bottle of 1905 Carruades de Lafite, the second wine of Chateau Lafite Rothschild, an icon of Bordeaux. Hubert’s task is to discern whether the wine inside is what it purports to be, Bloomberg Pursuits will report in its Autumn 2014 issue.